"And here," says Ruysbroeck of the self which has reached this point,"there begins a hunger and a thirst which shall never more be stilled."

In the First Form of Contemplation that self has been striving to knowbetter its own natural plane of existence. It has stretched out thefeelers of its intuitive love into the general stream of duration ofwhich it is a part. Breaking down the fences of personality, mergingitself in a larger consciousness, it has learned to know the World ofBecoming from within--as a citizen, a member of the great society oflife, not merely as a spectator. But the more deeply and completely youbecome immersed in and aware of this life, the greater the extension ofyour consciousness; the more insistently will rumours and intimationsof a higher plane of experience, a closer unity and more completesynthesis, begin to besiege you. You feel that hitherto you navereceived the messages of life in a series of disconnected words andnotes, from which your mind constructed as best it could certaincoherent sentences and tunes--laws, classifications, relations, and therest. But now you reach out towards the ultimate sentence and melody,which exist independently of your own constructive efforts; and realisethat the words and notes which so often puzzled you by displaying anintensity that exceeded the demands of your little world, only havebeauty and meaning just because and in so far as you discern them to bethe partial expressions of a greater whole which is still beyond yourreach.

You have long been like a child tearing up the petals of flowers inorder to make a mosaic on the garden path; and the results of thismurderous diligence you mistook for a knowledge of the world. When thebits fitted with unusual exactitude, you called it science. Now at lastyou have perceived the greater truth and loveliness of the living plantfrom which you broke them: have, in fact, entered into direct communionwith it, "united" with its reality. But this very recognition of theliving growing plant does and must entail for you a consciousness ofdeeper realities, which, as yet, you have not touched: of theintangible things and forces which feed and support it; of the wholeuniverse that touches you through its life. A mere cataloguing of allthe plants--though this were far better than your old game of indexingyour own poor photographs of them--will never give you access to theUnity, the Fact, whatever it may be, which manifests itself throughthem. To suppose that it can do so is the cardinal error of the "naturemystic": an error parallel with that of the psychologist who looks forthe soul in "psychic states."

The deeper your realisation of the plant in its wonder, the moreperfect your union with the world of growth and change, the quicker,the more subtle your response to its countless suggestions; so much themore acute will become your craving for Something More. You will nowfind and feel the Infinite and Eternal, making as it were veiled andsacramental contacts with you under these accidents--through these itsceaseless creative activities--and you will want to press through andbeyond them, to a fuller realisation of, a more perfect and unmediatedunion with, the Substance of all That Is. With the great widening anddeepening of your life that has ensued from the abolition of a narrowselfhood, your entrance into the larger consciousness of living things,there has necessarily come to you an instinctive knowledge of a finaland absolute group-relation, transcending and including all lesserunions in its sweep. To this, the second stage of contemplation, inwhich human consciousness enters into its peculiar heritage, somethingwithin you now seems to urge you on.

If you obey this inward push, pressing forward with the "sharp dart ofyour longing love," forcing the point of your wilful attention furtherand further into the web of things, such an ever-deepening realisation,such an extension of your conscious life, will indeed become possibleto you. Nothing but your own apathy, your feeble and limited desire,limits this realisation. Here there is a strict relation between demandand supply--your achievement shall be in proportion to the greatness ofyour desire. The fact, and the in-pressing energy, of the Realitywithout does not vary. Only the extent to which you are able to receiveit depends upon your courage and generosity, the measure in which yougive yourself to its embrace. Those minds which set a limit to theirself-donation must feel as they attain it, not a sense of satisfactionbut a sense of constriction. It is useless to offer your spirit agarden--even a garden inhabited by saints and angels--and pretend thatit has been made free of the universe. You will not have peace untilyou do away with all banks and hedges, and exchange the garden for thewilderness that is unwalled; that wild strange place of silence where"lovers lose themselves."

Yet you must begin this great adventure humbly; and take, as Julian ofNorwich did, the first stage of your new outward-going journey alongthe road that lies nearest at hand. When Julian looked with the eye ofcontemplation upon that "little thing" which revealed to her theoneness of the created universe, her deep and loving sight perceived init successively three properties, which she expressed as well as shemight under the symbols of her own theology: "The first is that Godmade it; the second is that God loveth it; the third is that Godkeepeth it." Here are three phases in the ever-widening contemplativeapprehension of Reality. Not three opinions, but three facts, for whichshe struggles to find words. The first is that each separate livingthing, budding "like an hazel nut" upon the tree of life, and theredestined to mature, age, and die, is the outbirth of another power, ofa creative push: that the World of Becoming in all its richness andvariety is not ultimate, but formed by Something other than, andutterly transcendent to, itself. This, of course, the religious mindinvariably takes for granted: but we are concerned with immediateexperience rather than faith. To feel and know those two aspects ofReality which we call "created" and "uncreated," nature and spirit--tobe as sharply aware of them, as sure of them, as we are of land andsea--is to be made free of the supersensual world. It is to stand foran instant at the Poet's side, and see that Poem of which you havedeciphered separate phrases in the earlier form of contemplation. Thenyou were learning to read: and found in the words, the lines, thestanzas, an astonishing meaning and loveliness. But how much greaterthe significance of every detail would appear to you, how much moretruly you would possess its life, were you acquainted with the Poem:not as a mere succession of such lines and stanzas, but as anon-successional whole.

From this Julian passes to that deeper knowledge of the heart whichcomes from a humble and disinterested acceptance of life; that thisCreation, this whole changeful natural order, with all its apparentcollisions, cruelties, and waste, yet springs from an ardour, animmeasurable love, a perpetual donation, which generates it, upholdsit, drives it; for "all-thing hath the being by the love of God."Blake's anguished question here receives its answer: the Mind thatconceived the lamb conceived the tiger too. Everything, says Julian ineffect, whether gracious, terrible, or malignant, is enwrapped in love:and is part of a world produced, not by mechanical necessity, but bypassionate desire.

Therefore nothing can really be mean, nothing despicable; nothing,however perverted, irredeemable. The blasphemous other-worldliness ofthe false mystic who conceives of matter as an evil thing and fliesfrom its "deceits," is corrected by this loving sight. Hence, the morebeautiful and noble a thing appears to us, the more we love it--so muchthe more truly do we see it: for then we perceive within it the Divineardour surging up towards expression, and share that simplicity andpurity of vision in which most saints and some poets see all things "asthey are in God."

Lastly, this love-driven world of duration--this work within which theDivine Artist passionately and patiently expresses His infinite dreamunder finite forms--is held in another, mightier embrace. It is "kept,"says Julian. Paradoxically, the perpetual changeful energies of loveand creation which inspire it are gathered up and made complete withinthe unchanging fact of Being: the Eternal and Absolute, within whichthe world of things is set as the tree is set in the supporting earth,the enfolding air. There, finally, is the rock and refuge of theseeking consciousness wearied by the ceaseless process of the flux.There that flux exists in its wholeness, "all at once"; in a mannerwhich we can never comprehend, but which in hours of withdrawal we maysometimes taste and feel. It is in man's moments of contact with this,when he penetrates beyond all images, however lovely, howeversignificant, to that ineffable awareness which the mystics call "NakedContemplation"--since it is stripped of all the clothing with whichreason and imagination drape and disguise both our devils and ourgods--that the hunger and thirst of the heart is satisfied, and wereceive indeed an assurance of ultimate Reality. This assurance is notthe cool conclusion of a successful argument. It is rather the seizingat last of Something which we have ever felt near us and enticing us:the unspeakably simple because completely inclusive solution of all thepuzzles of life.

As, then, you gave yourself to the broken-up yet actual reality of thenatural world, in order that it might give itself to you, and yourpossession of its secret was achieved, first by surrender of selfhood,next by a diligent thrusting out of your attention, last by a union oflove; so now by a repetition upon fresh levels of that same process,you are to mount up to higher unions still. Held tight as it seems toyou in the finite, committed to the perpetual rhythmic changes, theunceasing flux of "natural" life--compelled to pass on from state tostate, to grow, to age, to die--there is yet, as you discovered in thefirst exercise of recollection, something in you which endures throughand therefore transcends this world of change. This inhabitant, thismobile spirit, can spread and merge in the general consciousness, andgather itself again to one intense point of personality. It has too aninnate knowledge of--an instinct for--another, greater rhythm, anotherorder of Reality, as yet outside its conscious field; or as we say, acapacity for the Infinite. This capacity, this unfulfilled craving,which the cunning mind of the practical man suppresses and disguises asbest it can, is the source of all your unrest. More, it is the trueorigin of all your best loves and enthusiasms, the inspiring cause ofyour heroisms and achievements; which are but oblique and tentativeefforts to still that strange hunger for some final object of devotion,some completing and elucidating vision, some total self-donation, somegreat and perfect Act within which your little activity can be merged.

St. Thomas Aquinas says, that a man is only withheld from this desiredvision of the Divine Essence, this discovery of the Pure Act (whichindeed is everywhere pressing in on him and supporting him), by theapparent necessity which he is under of turning to bodily images, ofbreaking up his continuous and living intuition into Conceptual scraps;in other words, because he cannot live the life of sensation withoutthought. But it is not the man, it is merely his mental machinery whichis under this "necessity." This it is which translates, analyses,incorporates in finite images the boundless perceptions of the spiritpassing through its prism the White Light of Reality, and shattering itto a succession of coloured rays. Therefore the man who would know theDivine Secret must unshackle himself more thoroughly than ever beforefrom the tyranny of the image-making power. As it is not by the methodsof the laboratory that we learn to know life, so it is not by themethods of the intellect that we learn to know God.

"For of all other creatures and their works," says the author of TheCloud of Unknowing, "yea, and of the works of God's self, may a manthrough grace have full-head of knowing, and well he can think of them:but of God Himself can no man think. And therefore I would leave allthat thing that I can think, and choose to my love that thing that Icannot think. For why; He may well be loved, but not thought. By lovemay He be gotten and holden; but by thought never."

"Gotten and holden": homely words, that suggest rather theoutstretching of the hand to take something lying at your very gates,than the long outward journey or terrific ascent of the contemplativesoul. Reality indeed, the mystics say, is "near and far"; far from ourthoughts, but saturating and supporting our lives. Nothing would benearer, nothing dearer, nothing sweeter, were the doors of ourperception truly cleansed. You have then but to focus attention uponyour own deep reality, "realise your own soul," in order to find it."We dwell in Him and He in us": you participate in the Eternal Ordernow. The vision of the Divine Essence--the participation of its ownsmall activity in the Supernal Act--is for the spark of your soul aperpetual process. On the apex of your personality, spirit ever gazesupon Spirit, melts and merges in it: from and by this encounter itslife arises and is sustained. But you have been busy from yourchildhood with other matters. All the urgent affairs of "life," as youabsurdly called it, have monopolised your field of consciousness. Thusall the important events of your real life, physical and spiritual--themysterious perpetual growth of you, the knitting up of fresh bits ofthe universe into the unstable body which you confuse with yourself,the hum and whirr of the machine which preserves your contacts with thematerial world, the more delicate movements which condition yourcorrespondences with, and growth within, the spiritual order--all thesehave gone on unperceived by you. All the time you have been kept andnourished, like the "Little Thing," by an enfolding and creative love;yet of this you are less conscious than you are of the air that youbreathe.

Now, as in the first stage of contemplation you learned andestablished, as a patent and experienced fact, your fraternal relationwith all the other children of God, entering into the rhythm of theirexistence, participating in their stress and their joy; will you not atleast try to make patent this your filial relation too? Thisactualisation of your true status, your place in the Eternal World, iswaiting for you. It represents the next phase in your gradualachievement of Reality. The method by which you will attain to it isstrictly analogous to that by which you obtained a more vivid awarenessof the natural world in which you grow and move. Here too it shall bedirect intuitive contact, sensation rather than thought, which shallbring you certitude--"tasting food, not talking about it," as St.Bonaventura says.

Yet there is a marked difference between these two stages. In thefirst, the deliberate inward retreat and gathering together of yourfaculties which was effected by recollection, was the prelude to a newcoming forth, an outflow from the narrow limits of a merely personallife to the better and truer apprehension of the created world. Now, inthe second stage, the disciplined and recollected attention seems totake an opposite course. It is directed towards a plane of existencewith which your bodily senses have no attachments: which is not merelymisrepresented by your ordinary concepts, but cannot be represented bythem at all. It must therefore sink inwards towards its own centre,"away from all that can be thought or felt," as the mystics say, "awayfrom every image, every notion, every thing," towards that strangecondition of obscurity which St. John of the Cross calls the "Night ofSense." Do this steadily, checking each vagrant instinct, eachinsistent thought, however "spiritual" it may seem; pressing ever moredeeply inwards towards that ground, that simple and undifferentiatedBeing from which your diverse faculties emerge. Presently you will findyourself, emptied and freed, in a place stripped bare of all themachinery of thought; and achieve the condition of simplicity whichthose same specialists call nakedness of spirit or "Wayless Love," andwhich they declare to be above all human images and ideas--a state ofconsciousness in which "all the workings of the reason fail." Then youwill observe that you have entered into an intense and vivid silence: asilence which exists in itself, through and in spite of the ceaselessnoises of your normal world. Within this world of silence you seem asit were to lose yourself, "to ebb and to flow, to wander and be lost inthe Imageless Ground," says Ruysbroeck, struggling to describe thesensations of the self in this, its first initiation into the "waylessworld, beyond image," where "all is, yet in no wise."

Yet in spite of the darkness that enfolds you, the Cloud of Unknowinginto which you have plunged, you are sure that it is well to be here. Apeculiar certitude which you cannot analyse, a strange satisfaction andpeace, is distilled into you. You begin to understand what the Psalmistmeant, when he said, "Be still, and know." You are lost in awilderness, a solitude, a dim strange state of which you can saynothing, since it offers no material to your image-making mind.

But this wilderness, from one point of view so bare and desolate, fromanother is yet strangely homely. In it, all your sorrowful questioningsare answered without utterance; it is the All, and you are within itand part of it, and know that it is good. It calls forth the utmostadoration of which you are capable; and, mysteriously, gives love forlove. You have ascended now, say the mystics, into the Freedom of theWill of God; are become part of a higher, slower duration, whichcarries you as it were upon its bosom and--though never perhaps beforehas your soul been so truly active--seems to you a stillness, a rest.

The doctrine of Plotinus concerning a higher life of unity, a lowerlife of multiplicity, possible to every human spirit, will now appearto you not a fantastic theory, but a plain statement of fact, which youhave verified in your own experience. You perceive that these are thetwo complementary ways of apprehending and uniting with Reality--theone as a dynamic process, the other as an eternal whole. Thusunderstood, they do not conflict. You know that the flow, the broken-upworld of change and multiplicity, is still going on; and that you, as acreature of the time-world, are moving and growing with it. But, thanksto the development of the higher side of your consciousness, you arenow lifted to a new poise; a direct participation in that simple,transcendent life "broken, yet not divided," which gives to thistime-world all its meaning and validity. And you know, withoutderogation from the realness of that life of flux within which youfirst made good your attachments to the universe, that you are also atrue constituent of the greater whole; that since you are man, you arealso spirit, and are living Eternal Life now, in the midst of time.

The effect of this form of contemplation, in the degree in which theordinary man may learn to practise it, is like the sudden change ofatmosphere, the shifting of values, which we experience when we passfrom the busy streets into a quiet church; where a lamp burns, and asilence reigns, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. Thence ispoured forth a stillness which strikes through the tumult without.Eluding the flicker of the arc-lamps, thence through an upper window wemay glimpse a perpetual star.

The walls of the church, limiting the range of our attention, shuttingout the torrent of life, with its insistent demands and appeals, makepossible our apprehension of this deep eternal peace. The character ofour consciousness, intermediate between Eternity and Time, and everready to swing between them, makes such a device, such a concrete aidto concentration, essential to us. But the peace, the presence, iseverywhere--for us, not for it, is the altar and the sanctuaryrequired--and your deliberate, humble practice of contemplation willteach you at last to find it; outside the sheltering walls ofrecollection as well as within. You will realise then what Julianmeant, when she declared the ultimate property of all that was made tobe that "God keepeth it": will feel the violent consciousness of anenfolding Presence, utterly transcending the fluid, changefulnature-life, and incomprehensible to the intelligence which thatnature-life has developed and trained. And as you knew the secret ofthat nature-life best by surrendering yourself to it, by entering itscurrents, and refusing to analyse or arrange: so here, by a deliberategiving of yourself to the silence, the rich "nothingness," the "Cloud,"you will draw nearest to the Reality it conceals from the eye of sense."Lovers put out the candle and draw the curtains," says Patmore, "whenthey wish to see the God and the Goddess: and in the higher communion,the night of thought is the light of perception."

Such an experience of Eternity, the attainment of that intuitiveawareness, that meek and simple self-mergence, which the mystics callsometimes, according to its degree and special circumstances, theQuiet, the Desert of God, the Divine Dark, represents the utmost thathuman consciousness can do of itself towards the achievement of unionwith Reality. To some it brings joy and peace, to others fear: to all aparadoxical sense of the lowliness and greatness of the soul, which nowat last can measure itself by the august standards of the Infinite.Though the trained and diligent will of the contemplative can, ifcontrol of the attention be really established, recapture this state ofawareness, retreat into the Quiet again and again, yet it is ofnecessity a fleeting experience; for man is immersed in duration,subject to it. Its demands upon his attention can only cease with thecessation of physical life--perhaps not then. Perpetual absorption inthe Transcendent is a human impossibility, and the effort to achieve itis both unsocial and silly. But this experience, this "ascent to theNought," changes for ever the proportions of the life thatonce hasknown it; gives to it depth and height, and prepares the way for thosefurther experiences, that great transfiguration of existence whichcomes when the personal activity of the finite will gives place to thegreat and compelling action of another Power.__________________________________________________________________

This chapter deals with contemplating the "world of Being" which Underhill in the previous chapter called "Metaphysical" which helps me not at all to understand what this chapter is about. Why do we need this intermediate form of contemplation? Well, Underhill was a mystic and i am not. This is an experiential thing; until i have fully learned to contemplate nature, i won't have the experience required to understand why i cannot just skip to the "third form."

I am further troubled by her omission of Eastern (Taoist, Hindu, and Buddhist) examples of meditation and contemplation, which, paradoxically, might further simplify her teaching.

In the same vein, i have to be careful about my understanding of her terms "desire" and "craving." I immediately think of the Noble Truth that all suffering is caused by desire. I have to understand better than i do the idea of "disinterested adoration." or detachment with love. If i can clarify this i can perhaps understand how an impersonal and "ruthless" Tao can be the source of compassion and mercy in its human followers.

Evidently, because the world of Becoming and the word of Being are "opposites" they must be contemplated separately before they can be experienced as a unity in the "third form of contemplation." How Taoists. Buddhists, and agnostics can deal with this, i will have to wait to find out.

I much enjoyed the section on Julian's visions (pages 61-64) which seemed to me to give the clearer idea of what Underhill was trying to say here. Buy why should "He maintaineth" creation seem to be supposed to be more important than "He loveth" it?

My damned mind keeps getting in the way of my heart's desire to achieve unity with the "One."